A bizarrely political tale that takes a side-swipe at Colonial-industrial exploitation of less developed nations in passing. A hubristic scientist is astonishingly idiotic - and not, in my opinion, an accurate stereotype except in terms of egotism. Deeply sceptical of science and engineering at the same time as taking advantage of both in order to produce mass market copies of the book itself...

Glaisher shakes up meteorology by founding the Meteorological Society, standardising instrumentation and reporting, creating the first newspaper weather reports and producing the first synoptic charts of recent weather.

The Nativity, Ted Hughes style! (An interesting choice since he wasn't Christian, or formally religious at all.) Ever wondered what the innkeepers thought about events in Bethlehem that night? Read here to find out. Try to ignore the dumb mistake where they decide to cook a pig...

A short and simple story that fits into the Lives of Martyrs and Miracle of the Virgin genres. Hits just about every negative stereotype about Jewish people in less than four pages, using Jews as boogeymen in similar fashion to the way Islam/Muslims often are in Romances of the period.

The only point of the lengthy sections on semaphore and the electrical telegraph seems to be that they afforded the means to transmit data from disparate locations for use in forecasts and then to distribute the forecasts themselves.

This book makes an excellent attempt to clearly explain a topic that is conceptually difficult, mathematically obscure (and potentially difficult...) and fraught with pitfalls that have trapped many, many unwary but enthusiastic scientists. The early chapters build on each other logically and provide a usable entry into the field and its practicalities. The later "advanced topics" represent a significant jump in difficulty, requiring a wide range of mathematical techniques that are assumed rather than explained, and are really only a good jumping off point into the wider literature on some really esoteric subjects...

Espy explains cloud formation by thermal updraft. He concludes that storm winds should therefore point radially towards the eye instead of rotating round it, in order to fill in the low pressure there. He is wrong on this point in terms of observational fact. Redfield is already groping towards the solution of the contradiction, thinking that storm rotation has to do with Earth's rotation. Reid observes that storms rotate opposite ways in the northern and southern hemispheres. The missing concept is the Coriolis Effect.